1 Hot Scheming Mess

by Lucy Carol

  He released the kiss suddenly, setting her down fast. His hands held firm on her upper arms. Her breathing was still coming quick as he said, “If you never got laid last night, you can’t blame me. I would have got the job done.” With that he stalked off, going back to work.

  Madison ran at him, and as he turned around to the sound of her pounding footsteps, she jumped up into his chest. The momentum threw him back, as she wrapped her legs around his waist, her fists in his curly brown hair. He stumbled, his hands under her rump, trying to catch his balance, and wound up with his back against a large bush by the cafe window. His feet slid in a small patch of wet grass at the base of the bush, and they went down in their kiss, landing on his butt. Madison’s leg muscles pulled him in hard as her fists in his hair pulled him away from her face. She said, “You have no idea what I put him through last night. I may be horny out of my mind, but I’m not easy. Nothing is, anymore.” She stood up and turned to go back to her car but was stopped at a thumping on the window, with a muffled voice coming from behind the glass.

  “Dude, Potatoes!” The barista guy from yesterday morning had a manic smile on his face. “Behave yourself, girl!” He stood with some of the customers at the window, watching Madison and Jason. He gave Jason the thumbs up as Madison hurried back to her car.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Spenser was not pleased. At all.

  “She’d better not come near me. I’ll kill her!” Spenser said viciously. “Why didn’t Daniel tell me about this? I’ll kill him, too.”

  “Spenser, please. It’s not like she was kissing him or anything. She was quietly and efficiently, kicking everyone’s ass. He’s probably embarrassed.”

  Spenser stood up, walked over to an end table and grabbed her cell phone. She punched a few speed dial buttons as she muttered angry sounds and put the phone on her ear. The other hand went on her hip.

  Madison was glad it wasn’t her on Spenser’s bad side this morning. Daniel must’ve known that Madison would talk about last night’s street fight with Spenser. He should have told her himself, not that it would make any difference in the outcome, but at least Spenser wouldn’t now be feeling like he was hiding anything serious from her. She told her that Daniel had a sizable goose egg on the back of his head when she’d left last night.

  Madison now found herself in a place of questioning everything, suspecting everyone, to the point that she didn’t know if she was being foolish to think that the woman in black last night was part of this mess or foolish not to. Seattle was, after all, known to have several self-proclaimed defenders of justice, complete with homemade costumes. What a town.

  “I think you left something out last night,” said Spenser into the phone. Walking into the other room, probably for privacy, Spenser’s voice faded into the background as she spoke with Daniel on the phone, and the sounds of the washer and dryer came forward in Madison’s hearing.

  At the very least, spilling some of last night’s experiences to Spenser put a little sanity back into Madison. The act of sharing some of her heart with a friend who understood, who got it, was a luxury that Madison now realized she had been taking for granted. Because now, unlike normal days, she was not at liberty to tell Spenser everything. The FBI search, the revelation of Grandpa flying to DC, Mitch and Ray, and the escape of Unibrow, formerly known as Mr. Duct Tape, were getting harder and harder to skip over. And now there was Jason! Not being able to share those details made her want to squeeze every moment out of the details that she did feel free to share, such as the street fight from last night, the latest episode of her ridiculous love life, and her painful argument with her mother.

  She was trying to figure out how she would describe Toonie to Spenser when she realized that she hadn’t eaten Toonie’s cookies from yesterday. She poured herself a warm-up of the coffee and pulled out the little baggie from her big tote bag.

  Once Spenser returned, Madison offered one of the cookies to her. They each took a bite and chewed as the heavenly flavor came forth. Oh, my God. They looked at each other with wide eyes, their jaws working. Their euphoric sounds mingled.

  Spenser asked, “Where did you get these?”

  Madison swallowed. “My neighbor Toonie made them. She says it’s a secret recipe that she doesn’t give out.”

  “That’s just wrong,” Spenser said. “These could bring about world peace.”

  Madison added, “Or start a war.” They each had one more with their coffee and sighed at the thought that there were no more cookies. “Wow,” said Madison. “Those were day-old cookies. She gave them to me yesterday.”

  She heard the ding from the dryer, indicating that the laundry load was finished. Madison took another quick sip of her coffee and hurried to the dryer, sorting her clothes and folding them up. ExBoy’s t-shirt was now nicely clean and folded. She kept it separate from the rest of her laundry to return it to him later, and threw the second load from the washing machine into the dryer. She still had some clothes left to wash, but it wasn’t enough to make a full load.

  “Spenser?” she called out. “Do you have anything you want washed? We can add it to my stuff to make a full load.”

  Spenser called back, “Let me go check.”

  Madison came back to the table, reached down into her tote, and pulled out the fabric that had been in the metal box. It was some old tablecloth that Grandpa had used to pad out the metal box and maybe provide a little protection for the paperwork and clippings. She figured she might as well add it to the laundry load. She opened the first fold of the fabric, and saw that there was a huge stain on it, like brown water. It looked gross, so she put it on the floor and kneeled down next to it, slowly opening up each fold. It seemed to be an old linen tablecloth with a towel folded up inside. Madison’s heart started to race, as Spenser walked back in saying, “I don’t really have any clothes to add…” she stopped at the fearful expression on Madison’s face. The towel’s stain was heavier and even deeper in color. Old blood made the towel stiff and resistant to being unfolded. The initials WP were monogrammed on the towel.

  Madison worked hard to control her voice but it still came out a little shaky as she said, “What am I supposed to make of that? I mean besides the fact that it really resembles a blood stain, and besides the fact that I’m a little lightheaded right now, I’m thinking maybe I had better not wash it.”

  Alarmed, Spenser asked, “Where did that come from?”

  “This was in that old metal box. I thought it was in there for padding,” said Madison.

  “Part of the clues?” asked Spenser.

  Madison looked down at the stained fabrics in front of her. She didn’t want to say yes. That might make it more real. So she settled for nodding her head.

  A thought occurred to her, and she grabbed the tote bag, pulling out the cardboard, saying, “This was in the metal box, too.” She flattened out the pieces of cardboard, and by following the various fold lines, it was easy to return it to its previous state of a small cardboard box. It too had some stains in it but they were much lighter. The odd shape of the stain at the bottom of the box, matched the shape of the stain on the tablecloth. Madison put the tablecloth into the box, lining up the shapes. Whatever had stained the tablecloth had soaked through to the box, leaving the same wet shape.

  She looked at the old blood stain on the towel. It was in the center of the towel, was darker in color, and had spread further out to the sides than it had on the tablecloth. She put the towel on top of the tablecloth and lined up the shapes again. Something watery, combined with some blood, had happened on that towel, then soaked through the tablecloth to the box. She looked at it, perplexed, sick with worry.

  She thought of the old newspaper clippings and the odd birth certificate. The point of it was still escaping her. Her grandfather had said “especially don’t tell Ann, promise me. Don’t tell Ann.”

  She crawled across the floor to where she had left her purse, digging furiously through it as she kneeled, and pulled o
ut the old black and white photo of a young Vincent Cruz, the shot taken through the leaves of a bush. She didn’t care any longer if Spenser saw it or not. She needed her friend near her right now.

  The small box in the photo was a match. Her grandfather stood over this same box, holding this tablecloth and towel, with something else inside.

  The answer presented itself to her. In a soft and mournful tone, she said, “Oh.” She put her hand at her mouth and said through her fingers, “Poor thing.”

  “What?” asked Spenser, shaking her hands up and down as if they were burned. “Madison, you’re scaring me. What is it?”

  “Remember the birth certificate we saw?”

  “Yes,” said Spenser. “You said your mom’s birth date was off by almost two months.” Madison looked at the sad messy fabrics in the box, and said, “I’m starting to think that was her real birth date. She was born during the International Student Exposition.” Her earlier sense of injustice shifted over and made room for someone else.

  She held up the photo for Spenser to see, and Spenser took it, studying it closely. “I think my grandfather found this box when he was a young gardener at the UW. I think an abandoned baby was in it.” She pushed her fingers through her hair as she stared at the box, the far-reaching implications hitting home.

  “He took it home to my grandmother.” Her mother was adopted. And because there were conflicting birth certificates, it was probably done illegally.

  “So who took this picture?” asked Spenser.

  “Whoever blackmailed him,” she said.

  Why would Grandpa have all this stuff hidden for so long? Why hadn’t he thrown it all away when her mother was still a baby? What was he saving it for and what had he told the FBI in DC? Was he confessing to being a baby stealer?

  Spenser was on the floor with her. From her side, she had her arms wrapped around Madison, and said, “You know it doesn’t matter, right? You know that. I want to hear you say it before you leave here.”

  Madison put her hands up on Spenser’s forearm and said, “Don’t worry. Of course I know. Spensy, you’re such a good friend; I don’t deserve you. But for the first time I wonder if my mom has anyone like you in her life. I mean, who will she have to talk to about this when she finds out?” Anger on behalf of her mother began to ignite in Madison.

  “Look at how they left her. A baby wrapped in a towel, soaked in her own birthing fluids and blood.” Tears burned her eyes. “They didn’t even have the decency to clean her up and wrap her in something clean and dry.”

  Spenser reached out and ran her fingers over the monogrammed initials. “It’s that WP logo again, from the hotel we read about in the clippings.”

  “I saw that.”

  “She must have been born in there. So odd. An expensive hotel. Then she winds up in a box.”

  “That’s why Grandpa kept all those clippings about the International Student Exposition. All the students, and their guardians, and the judges, were put up in that high rise hotel. I hid all that paperwork at Robot Moon Productions. I was going to go get it out today, anyway.”

  She took a deep breath and exhaled. She said, “I have to get ready for back-to-back singing telegrams today. Then I’ll get over there and retrieve the paperwork.”

  Spenser said, “Remember the one-word note that you showed to Daniel? He said it was in Cyrillic. Russia was still the Soviet Union back then, and one of the articles mentioned a Soviet girl who was homesick and wouldn’t leave her room.”

  “How is it even possible,” Madison asked, “for a girl to be that far along in her pregnancy and no one can tell?”

  Spenser said, “Remember Elsie in high school?”

  Madison blinked. “I forgot about that. She fooled everyone.”

  “We all just thought she was fat until she went into labor,” said Spenser. “Some girls can pull it off.”

  The implications continued to open up to Madison’s understanding. She said, “If it was one of the students, then the guardians had to know. That’s why they allowed her to skip the Exposition and stay in her room. They probably insisted.”

  “But why wouldn’t they fly her home?” asked Spenser.

  Madison stood up from the floor. The sight of the stained fabrics and box made her heartsick. She said, “I don’t know. This was a fast and dirty job, to keep it a secret.”

  The hacking at the UW must have been to find the gardeners on payroll that year. They found her grandfather, who still lived at the address of the first house he’d ever bought. And whatever it was that he said to Unibrow, Unibrow didn’t like it. She remembered hearing Unibrow shouting “niet” which she now understood was Russian for “no.” It led to their desperate fist fight.

  At first she had felt a little sick at the memory of hitting that stranger with a drill. But now… now that she had seen evidence of how callous the treatment of a newborn baby had been, a baby who had grown up to try to be perfect, to the point of driving Madison crazy, but a desire to be good and perfect nonetheless… well, Madison had no regrets about swinging that drill.

  I’ll do it again if he tries to hurt my grandpa.

  She heard the dryer ding. Time to fold up the laundry, yes. But she was also ready to fight.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Wearing her little black dress and low heels with her hair neatly tied back into a lovely barrette, Madison entered Holme’s Memorial Chapel carrying her usual tote bag and followed the signs to services for Eddie Willet. Looking around she located the attendant from Holme’s Memorial Chapel, introduced herself, and handed him her card from Phil’s agency to identify herself as the entertainment hired for the occasion. She made it clear that she would treat this very sober occasion with dignity and respect. The pudgy attendant looked at her with knit brows and asked, “Are you sure you were hired to do that? I know this crowd. Actually, I knew the deceased. He had a… reputation. It’s hard to believe that he would want to suddenly be so conservative on the occasion of his own funeral.”

  Madison asked, “You knew him? You knew Eddie Willet?”

  “Well, not personally, but he attended other funerals here. He always put on quite the show.”

  Other people were starting to arrive and sign the guest book. Madison asked, “What do you mean by a show? What kind of show?”

  “Well, there was the time he showed up dressed as a clown and juggled some urns for the audience.”

  Madison blinked, “Juggled?”

  “I’m afraid so. The urns were empty of course. He also sang ‘My Funny Valentine.’” He smiled and nodded at an older lady walking up to the guest book, before continuing. “Then there was the time he arrived very early, dressed as a doctor in surgical scrubs and rubber gloves. He planted dozens of whoopee cushions under the cushions of the pews. Every time someone arrived and sat down, the whoopee cushions would, of course, go off, and people would giggle. But as they kept arriving and sitting, it got to the point that they were laughing in the aisles. Eddie would run up to each person who had set off one of the whoopee sounds and say that he was a proctologist that could help them.”

  Madison’s mouth was hanging open. She could hear a few sniffles behind her. She turned around and saw a man comforting a lady by gently hugging her and patting her back. The lady held a tissue to her eyes. Madison turned back around to the attendant. The attendant said, “He made so many people laugh. It’s a large family and he always helped them get through these tough times. Odd sense of humor, I know, but—”

  “Are you telling me that all these people that are arriving, are used to that sort of thing? At their family funerals?”

  “Oh, yes,” he answered. “It’s been a Willet family tradition for years. But now there is no one quite like him to do it for his funeral. That’s probably why he called your agency.”

  “I see,” said Madison.

  “Once, he came dressed as the grim reaper, dragging a stuffed dog on the end of a leash…”

  “I get it already,” said
Madison. “I need to do a fast change.” As she dashed down the hall, the attendant finished, “The dog had an X sewn over each eye…”

  *****

  Since Eddie had traditionally done his shtick at the start of services, Madison had to move like lightning to change her outfit. Her tote bag provided easy access to a few vitals, and she emerged from her makeshift dressing room barefoot and pregnant, her little black dress mostly covered up with ExBoy’s baggy t-shirt that had been folded up in her purse. The fact that it had a baby zombie on the front made it even better. She used a hair ribbon as a belt around her waist to accentuate her big belly, thanks to a small pillow she had grabbed from a chair in the hallway. The effect was perfect.

  Her hair was half piled on top of her head with loose hair rollers hanging down, about to make an escape. She ratted some of the hair that wasn’t in the rollers. Mascara that ran under her eyes, smeared lipstick, and a few blacked-out teeth gave her the look she was going for. She found an empty wine bottle in the trash in the hallway. Phil kept her supplied with all sorts of novelty music for any occasion that might be requested, so from the dozens of CDs that lived in her tote bag, she had what Eddie Willet had requested. After confirming her musical cues with the attendant, she took a deep breath, clutched her wine bottle prop, and staggered into the main room. The music started up for “You Made Me Love You.” But this was a raucous, comedic version, complete with bump and grind drum beats at key moments in the song.

  She sang and swayed to the music, pretending to lose her balance and almost knock over a chair. She would sing a verse, then hoist the wine bottle up high to take a long swallow, only to lean a little too far backward and stagger over into a spray of flowers. She acted like she’d lost her orientation and spent several seconds singing into the flowers before noticing where the audience really was. She knew the bump and grind section was coming up. To the audience, she was totally into this and having a great time, as they laughed through their tears, thankful that their tradition had been kept. But on the inside, Madison braced herself and danced over to the casket.